


" I'm running out of excuses"...Episode 2.1, Vows, Dollhouse Review

by shadowkat67



Series: Dollhouse Episode Reviews [7]
Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Episode Related, Episode Review, Episode: s02e01 Vows, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-27
Updated: 2009-09-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:00:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22406095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Series: Dollhouse Episode Reviews [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1612507





	" I'm running out of excuses"...Episode 2.1, Vows, Dollhouse Review

CW: Everyone is so into vampires...but zombies! cool..  
Me: Well vampires have hit the saturation point, I'm not sure there's anything new anyone can say about them. Zombies on the other hand, may be on the upswing..

 **Dollhouse** is an interesting twist on zombies. As Anya in BTVS once stated: _zombies don't eat brains or people. They do whatever the person who raised them demands them to do. They are at the beck and call of that creator._ (Which is true - the actual folklore states they don't eat people, they do the bidding of the person who raised them - often in a voodu rite.) In _Dollhouse_ \- Whedon takes this a step further, and examines the relationship between creator and creation. _Dollhouse_ is also to a degree a critique of the abuses of power seen within our own media and entertainment industries. The culpability of those who acquiesce to such manipulations, and the moral quandry of those who require them.  
  
Topher = writer/show-runner  
Adelle = network executive  
Whiskey/Claire = former tv star, executive producer/co-creator of her own series  
Echo=new tv star  
Ballard=agent  
Boyd=former agent, new co-producer, head producer, and network liason  
Senator = FCC and government censor, wondering about the ethics of the tv industry

That's one take at any rate.

My favorite scene from this week's episode, _Vowes_ , written and directed by Joss Whedon, is between Clair Saunders/Whiskey and Topher.

It may well be among Whedon's best - that small back and forth of dialogue between Whiskey/Saunders and Topher in Topher's bedroom. Beautifully acted and directed. That sequence ranks right up there with the epsidoes Beneath You, Once More With Feeling, Hush, Objects in Space, and The Body and is why I am a fan of this man's writing...he writes tv shows like a poet. It also works as an interesting philosophical meta on god, creation, and the ethical quandries of television writing - where you are in some respects more so than in any other medium super-imposing your view or creation on to another, objectifying someone else to make money or a point.

Dr. Claire Saunders (portrayed by the fabulous Amy Acker) in the final episode of Season 1, Omega, discovered that she had been a doll or active, who had been cut up by a rogue active named Alpha. Alpha cut her up in order for Echo to become number one. Her call name had been Whiskey. Alpha had also killed the real Dr. Saunders.

Claire sneaks into Topher's bed and comes on to him. He pushes her off him, evades her advances. In their back and forth - she askes him repeatedly why did you create me and more importantly why make me hate you?

> Claire: " Was it to make me love you? To create someone unattainable?"  
>  Topher: no, if I wanted a love slave, I could have made one and have.
> 
> "But", declares Claire, "where's the challenge in that? Much better to have someone who hates you, someone you have to win over."
> 
> Topher states: "that's not why I created you and that's not what I want. You don't know me."
> 
> Claire: Why did you create me?  
>  Topher: We needed a doctor. You could no longer be an active. Adelle requested that I get a doctor who was committed to our cause, who was kind, understanding, and respectful of the actives.  
>  Claire: Okay. So why did you make me hate you?  
>  Topher: I didn't. I...I wanted to create a person. Not a robot. I wanted someone to question me to challenge me. If you didn't, if you went with everything I did - someone could get hurt.  
>  I didn't create you to hate me, I created you to question me. You chose to hate me. That was your choice.
> 
> Topher: Would you have really slept with me?  
>  Claire: No. I cannot abide your smell. How can I live knowing I was created by someone I cannot abide? That everything I am, everything I feel is created by someone I hate?  
>  Topher: Adelle can turn you back to your former self.  
>  Claire: But.. I don't want to die. I want to live. If this body is the only way I can...I'm not ready to give it up, to give up life.
> 
> Claire: I'm nothing but excuses.  
>  Topher: You are human.  
>  Claire: Don't flatter yourself.

Other lines worth mentioning, before I forget them -

Claire to Boyde: I was created by a sociopath in a sweater vest.

and

finally, "I'm running out of excuses..."

Claire tells Boyd that she is afraid of everything. To leave the dollhouse. To be with people. To be in crowds. Everything. That she is literally nothing but excuses. When asked why she doesn't get plastic surgery herself, to fix the scars that Alpha gave her, she states they bring out my eyes. She can't give them up - they make up who she is.

The back and forth between Claire and Topher - reminds me a great deal of the Pirandella play, _Six Characters in Search of An Author_ \- where the characters question the writer, their god, and ask why they exist and what their purpose is. The author refuses to give them a purpose outside of the barest of descriptions and says just do your thing and the story unfolds, written by the characters, yet also by the author who set the parameters, who created them. They have choices, but their choices are limited by the personality that the author created, by their roles, and by the setting in which they have been placed. The mother is the mother. The father is the father. The son is the son. It is also a bit like the conversation between Job and God in the book of Job in the bible or between Whedon and God, between all of us and God - why did you create us to question you? Why do we even exist? What is our purpose? Why won't you give us answers? Because, says God, I wanted you to have free will, to be able to choose. I didn't want robots.

Claire is tormenting Topher, yet Topher points out to Claire that she does not know him - does not know anything about him, except for the fact that he was charged with creating her. He may well be her creator, but outside of that fact, he remains unknowable to her, beyond her understanding. He may not be the monster she sees him as, that we see him as. I created you to question everything, I wanted to make you whole, human, real - not a robot, not a zombie who agrees and caters to me. You hate me because you chose to. I made you human.  
Claire responds - don't flatter yourself.

On another completely different level, the back and forth reminds me of the battles between Sarah Michelle Gellar, James Marsters and the Buffy writers in S6 and S7 - where the actors stated according to interviews, I can't do this, this makes me feel like a whore, this is against everything I believe, I would never have chosen to play this role if I knew about this, I feel like a piece of meat, please can we do something else? (Gellar apparently had troubles with Dead Things' Balcony sequence, and Marsters had difficulties with Gone, Seeing Red, Dead Things, and Wrecked. He also had problems with the relentless teasing by the crew, Gellar and Landau regarding his nudity in Showtime and Bring on the Night and begged Whedon to let him keep his shirt on in later episodes. Whedon later related that he had not realized that he was abusing his power and in a way, Dollhouse is his attempt to examine that abuse, as well as the abuses of power that he witnesses within his own industry. He stated at the Cultural Humanist Q&A in response to an unrelated question regarding objectification - that he believed that we objectify each other, that we project ourselves, our desires, our wants, our fears onto others. All the time. And Dollhouse was to a degree his attempt to examine how we do it and the consequences of doing it. It was his attempt for what it is worth to examine abuses of power and to seek redemption through that examination.)

The conversation between Topher and Claire, which occurs at the center of the episode and is the focal point or B plot line, is echoed by the characters and stories around it. From Sierra's ironic banter with Ivy, the lab tech to Ballard and Echo's assignment regarding the arms dealer.

Sierra, who is asian, informs Ivy in a hauty voice that she cannot abide asians and would rather get her "treatment" from Topher, unless of course Ivy wishes to give her a spanking. It is a humorous exchange that underlines the horrific culture that we live in - where the media imprints its own views upon ours. In this persona, Sierra doesn't see herself as asian and even if she did, she is echoing what this persona has been programmed to believe, to think, that the person who is dumped inside her by Topher thinks. Her mind and body are not connected. And then there is Victor, the active who had his face sliced by Alpha in the last episode of Season 1, with his multiple plastic surgies that we never see. Victor, who keeps getting his face touched - is touched first by Adelle, who has objectified him - turned him into someone else for her own pleasure on many an occassion. Then again, by Sierra, who does it with compassion and kindness after the scars have healed. Sierra and Victor seem to see each other as they are, not as the Dollhouse does. While Paul Ballard struggles with his own objectification of Echo/Caroline - turning her into the ideal partner/female agent who he has known for three years -but only she remembers the three years, he has to look at his notes. Their partnership, her very identity is nothing but a construct, a lie, fabricated to catch an arms dealer. The dealer ironically is more honest than Ballard. Echo knows more about Jamie Bamber's arms dealer, than she knows about Ballard or the arms dealer knows about Echo for that matter. The most honest of the three is the arms dealer, the least villianous is the arms dealer - who is upfront about who and what he is, and is not running away from it.

Echo as the fake agent, Roma(?), marries Bamber's arms dealer. She has sex with him, declaring it to be meaningless, while Ballard cringes. She's but an actress in a play. The sex is just two bodies. It means nothing. Actors do it all the time. Ballard as her audience listens to it, he romanticizes her and his own role in the play. He tries to play knight errant, but is in actuality no different than Adelle here - triggering her to become a weapon, to attack Bamber, almost kill him. To defend them both against Bamber's villian - a villain who upon finding out his wife (Echo) is not who she appears to be - slamns her head against his grandfather's desk.

At the end, after they've defeated Bamber's character, Ballard approaches Echo with chagrin, and she tells him that she still remembers all the people she has been. "They are all inside my head, I hear them still, their whispers in the background, but none of them are me. Do you know who I am?"

> Ballard: Yes. Caroline.
> 
> Echo: I want to find her. (pause). I want to find all of them. Give all of them a voice.  
>  Will you help me?
> 
> Ballard: I will.

And the final bit is Ballard bonding Echo to himself, taking vows. He becomes her handler, something he'd resisted. It is the counter to Boyd, who resisted losing that status and has now become Adelle's right hand man, her enforcer. Boyd, who Ballard wonders aloud to Adelle, may be in league with the Senator who wishes to take down the Dollhouse. The Senator who aptly states - if we lose our minds, what are we?

> "I know why I am here," Ballard states. "Why is he?" And Adelle reminds him once again, that Echo is only still around, and not in the attic, due to her own curiousity. Ballard responds, "When you're done, what slice her open like yet another lab rat?"
> 
> "Well," states Adelle, "isn't that what science is about?"

The episode felt a bit like a klaidescope - those bits of colored glass that as you turn it you see new shapes and configurations, each based on the other. Or one of those games, where you pull apart the puzzel, to find another one beneath it. Layer, behind layer, behind layer. Topher objectifies his dolls, seeing them as his creations, playing god. Ballard objectifies Echo, seeing her as his weapon. Adelle sees them all as rats within her scientist's maze, justifying her actions as advancements for science. Why do we do it, the writer asks. What excuses do we make.

That's the line that echoes afterwards, not Echo's own line about finding herself, but rather Clair Saunder's..."I'm nothing but excuses.." to "I'm running out of excuses." The Dollhouse itself is built upon a complicated matrix of excuses and justifications. Most things are. It is as Topher states, part of what makes us human, making excuses. But it is also our choice whether to stick with them.


End file.
